Secure P2P Cross-Community Health Record Exchange in IHE compatible systems

This paper investigates a secure mechanism for Electronic Health Records (EHR) exchange over a Peer to Peer (P2P) agent based coordination framework. Our study is based on the SemHealthCoord framework, a platform for the exchange of EHR between autonomous health organisations that extends the existing interoperability standards as proposed by the Integrating Healthcare Enterprise (IHE). Every health organisation in SemHealthCoord represents a community within a P2P network. Communities use a set of autonomous agents and a set of distributed coordination rules to coordinate the agents in the search of specific health records. To enable secure interactions among communities, we propose the use of asymmetric keys and digital certificates. We specify the interaction protocols to provide integrity and authenticity between the communities, and, to illustrate the scalability of our approach, we evaluate the proposed solution in distributed settings by comparing the performance between secured and unsecured data exchange. The contribution of this work is that enables IHE based health communities to dynamically exchange EHR of patients with a secure P2P agent coordination framework.